Show HN: the Hand-Rolled Assembly Machine

HRAM is a computer simulator that runs real native assembly in the context of a 128x72 pixel screen with 8-bit colors (4 bits for red, 4 for green, no blue).

The idea is that you program it using your own assembly, in the same way they might have had to 50 years ago. It's almost like love2d but with assembly. You write an asm function that responds to events like mouse/keyboard/etc.

It takes your code, located at appdata\hram\hsig.s (it creates one for you on the first run) and runs it when it loads. I plan to add hot reloading soon, maybe later today.

And it's not an interpreter! It uses asmjit under the hood to compile your code into actual assembly and then just runs it. Which means this is literally as close to the metal as you can get writing games!

This is maybe the coolest and most exciting thing I've ever built. I'm really excited to see what you all think of it!

The manual is at https://hram.dev/indexb.html and the beta download file is at https://hram.dev/hram-100.zip so please let me know what you think!

It's like love2d but with a pico8 style screen and the code is entirely asm.

Download at https://hram.dev/hram-110.zip for version with hot code reloading.

Write event handler function in native assembly at appdata\hram\hsig.s that interacts with keyboard/mouse and 128x72 8-bit screen (red/green only).

Uses native jit, no interpreter. So if you write bad assembly it will segfault! But it's okay, just restart hram.exe (~360 kb) and try again.